If you think back just 10 years or so, we lived in an era where we simply couldn't rely on our PCs to work consistently for long periods of time. Snarl-ups and crashes would come with frustrating regularity. And if a PC were used heavily, reinstalls of Windows would usually need to be performed every year, if not more often.

Since then, the reliability of Microsoft's operating system has improved significantly -- and it needed to. We're used to buying tablets and IoT devices, on which the operating system is embedded on a chip, not a volatile hard disk, and where simply turning the thing off and on again will fix most problems.

Yet, despite our PC's newfound reliability, problems do still occur. And when they do, they're probably more frustrating than they were a decade ago. This is for two reasons. First, because we expect things to work, and second because we are using our PCs and computing devices more often and for more things than we used to.

When you encounter a problem, though, how can you get going again quickly and with as little fuss as possible? Nobody wants to be without his or her PC for days on end while it's professionally repaired, usually at great cost. Fortunately -- and very ironically in the view of this tech professional -- as the reliability of Microsoft Windows has increased, so have the number of bundled tools and utilities you can use to fix problems. I'd like to guide you through some of these, so you can learn about what goes wrong, and what the quick solutions might be.